Jamie Brown seems to be the ‘go to’ actor these days for any show in need of a hero.

He played John Simpson Kirkpatrick, who saved many lives in the First World War, in Valerie Laws’s play, The Man and the Donkey, and was back in the trenches last year as one of the famous Bradford brothers from County Durham in The Fighting Bradfords, by Carina Rodney.

Now he is playing Harry Clasper in Ed Waugh’s Hadaway Harry, a play about the 19th Century Geordie oarsman who became a sporting superhero.

The heroic side of rowing came to the fore at the Atlanta Olympics back in 1996 when, having landed his fourth gold medal, Steven Redgrave said: “Anybody who sees me in a boat has my permission to shoot me.”

He went on to win a fifth, of course, in Sydney four years later.

Harry Clasper, as portrayed by Jamie Brown, would have understood Redgrave’s anguish.

In one extraordinary 15-minute scene in Hadaway Harry, Jamie conveys the ferocious exertion of one of the champion oarsman’s famous races.

Facing the audience, he goes through the motions of an oarsman, increasing the tempo as the race progresses while simultaneously commentating on the event.

Seeing the play on its previous tour, this scene gave a good idea of the bull-like strength and determination of Clasper, racing at a time when kit and courses were neither as streamlined nor sophisticated as they are now.

“You’re not going to be able to recreate an actual rowing race on stage so it’s a matter of encouraging the audience to use their imagination and come with you,” says Jamie over a coffee in Newcastle.

“Sometimes when I’m sitting there in the middle of that scene I get a chance to glance up above the audience and I see people rocking backwards and forwards.”

Jamies describes that particular scene as “both a blessing and a curse”.

He explains: “It’s by far the most difficult thing I’ve done on stage. There’s not a huge amount of acting involved but without it I don’t think you’d get the sense of the sheer effort they had to put in.

“Imagine doing that against the current and with the resistance of the oars and the weight of the boats they used at the time.”

Hadaway Harry, a play about Harry Clasper

It is the type of challenge, he says, that, actors dream about – “an opportunity to test yourself and push yourself to the absolute limit.

“If I didn’t think it was worth it, it would have been hard to make myself do it time after time.

“But the subject matter, in terms of Harry Clasper’s legacy, and the piece that Ed has written and his enthusiasm for bringing it back, make it all worthwhile.”

As well as being a race winner, Harry Clasper (1812-70) was coach, referee and innovator.

“Harry’s outrigger set the standard for what is still used today and he was one of the few people to create a keelless boat,” says Jamie who, as you might expect, has become a bit of a Clasper expert.

The play – and no-one could accuse Ed Waugh of stinting in his support for a cause – has helped to raise awareness of this Victorian hero.

A blue plaque is to be unveiled on Thursday on the base of the High Level Bridge, on Newcastle Quayside, marking Clasper’s achievements on the Tyne.

Jamie will be there, as he has been to promote a Harry Clasper-branded beer and to pose with Virgin Trains locomotive 91115, Blaydon Races.

Jamie Brown as Harry Clasper with Virgin Trains loco Blaydon Races

The famous Tyneside song was written in honour of Harry and first performed in 1862.

The train company sponsored performances of Hadaway Harry at the London Rowing Club and lent a full-sized Blaydon Races metal plate to grace the stage.

So it is that Harry Clasper’s life and times are becoming much better known and appreciated.

As for Jamie Brown, he was brought up in Gateshead, on the Leam Lane Estate, and has a younger brother.

He recalls: “It was all football when I was young because that seemed more achievable. I was scouted by a couple of professional teams.

“Then as a young teenager I started doing drama at school but I never once thought of it as a career.

“Only in my later teens it got to a stage where people were encouraging me to go down that road.

“My school, Heworth Grange, was very committed to the performing arts with a fantastic youth theatre group and a really supportive staff.”

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After leaving school, Jamie embarked on an acting degree course at Bretton Hall (the old West Yorkshire arts college).

Now 32, he recalls: “It was strange at first because acting was something I’d always seen as a bit of a hobby while some people had wanted to be actors or dancers or singers since they were three years old.

“It took me a little bit of time to adjust to that mindset although I knew I enjoyed it.

“My parents backed me 110% although when I made the decision to do acting rather than football, my dad’s dream of me lifting the FA Cup went out the window.”

He laughs. “When I won the Culture Award last year (Jamie won The Journal Culture Award as performing artist of the year), I handed it to him.”

After college Jamie did a play on the Edinburgh Fringe and a Shakespeare tour with Chapterhouse, specialists in outdoor theatre.

I ask if there were any mishaps and he cheerfully recalls the time he was playing Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“I was wearing a toga and we had a very enthusiastic Puck.

“When I was lying there, supposedly asleep, and he was putting his love spell on me, he bopped me on the nose.

“For the next five minutes I could feel this warm trickle down my cheek. When I got up there was blood all over my toga and I looked like something from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

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“I love this place and the history of it, and there’s such a good network of people around the theatre here. I wanted to be part of that.”

He returned for family reasons, too. He and wife Adèle, an assistant headteacher, were at school and college together and they have young daughters, Fearne and Erin, who are two and nine months respectively.

“It’s important to me to see them every day because these are the years you never get back, when there’s a new discovery every day.”

Jamie says plenty of work has come his way since returning to the region.

He directed Geordie the Musical at the Customs House, which is being revived at the Tyne Theatre &amp; Opera House later in the year, and will also be appearing in another Ed Waugh play, Mr Corvan’s Music Hall, opening -at Durham’s Gala Theatre in May before a regional tour.

For now, though, Jamie is looking forward to his first appearances in front of an audience at the Theatre Royal.

Hadaway Harry is being performed there on Friday at 7.30pm and on Saturday at 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Tickets: www.theatreroyal.co.uk or tel. 08448 112121.